Ex-paramedic who mocked patients on Twitter slapped with lawsuit

By Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK | Thu Sep 19, 2013 6:21pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York City paramedic who was forced to resign this year after mocking patients by posting pictures of them on his Twitter account is being sued by a woman who said he uploaded a photograph of her in a wheelchair with a caption that ridiculed her weight.

Timothy Dluhos was a lieutenant in the city's fire department working as an emergency medical technician when the New York Post linked him in March to a Twitter account with the handle "Bad Lieutenant" and an image of Adolf Hitler for a profile picture.

The account, now deleted, contained many posts filled with slurs against black, Jewish, Asian and fat people. One post included a surreptitiously taken photograph of an obese woman in a wheelchair taken from behind and digitally altered to include the words "Wide Load" across the wheelchair's back.

Teena Gamzon, 65, said she is the woman in the photograph, and filed a lawsuit in the Kings County Supreme Court on Monday against Dluhos, saying that the thought of the photo, which was widely republished online, being seen by millions of people had made her physically sick.

She also named the City of New York as a defendant, accusing it of negligence. The suit seeks unspecified damages from both parties.

"I cried the entire day," Gamzon said in a phone interview from her home in Brooklyn, describing the day she first saw the photograph after it was reprinted on the front page of the New York Post. "I was just so upset, it was just devastating."

Gamzon said she has no memory of encountering Dluhos, but could see from the background of the photograph that it had been taken while she spent several months at a physical rehabilitation clinic in Staten Island in 2009 and 2010 following surgery on her leg for complications brought about by her diabetes.

The fire department suspended Dluhos without pay soon after he was linked to the Twitter account, a department spokesman said. Dluhos resigned before the termination proceedings that had begun against him were over, the spokesman said.

Dluhos could not be reached for comment on Thursday, and a message left for him was not returned. A spokeswoman for the city's law department said only that the city had not yet received the lawsuit.

(Editing by Scott Malone and L Gevirtz)

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Latin American presidents love Twitter - maybe too much

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro meets Venezuela's First Lady Cilia Flores in Havana, in this picture provided by Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro via Twitter on April 27, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro via Twitter/Handout

By Brian Winter

BUENOS AIRES | Mon Apr 29, 2013 8:57am EDT

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - When a million angry Argentines flooded the streets earlier this month to protest her government, President Cristina Fernandez decided to post a message on Twitter.

And another. And then another.

"Yes, I'm a bit stubborn, and I'm also old. But in the end, it's lucky to arrive at old age, isn't it?" one tweet read. She also mused about a 19th century fresco in her "gorgeous" palace, and the merits of a state-run literacy program.

At the end of the day, Fernandez had sent 61 tweets in a nine-hour period - prolific even by the standards of Latin America, where presidents and other leading politicians have embraced social media with a zeal unmatched anywhere else.

Their love for Twitter, in particular, has given millions of voyeurs a real-time window into policymaking - and, often, their leaders' most intimate thoughts.

Yet it has also fueled debate on whether some are guilty of "oversharing" - making politics more polarized, confrontations more personal, and potentially making the leaders themselves look awkward when they post about chats with strangers in a bathroom, for example, as Fernandez also did this month.

"Everybody who uses Twitter knows that sometimes you write something and push the send button without thinking enough about it. That's dangerous in politics ... and we've seen many examples of it," said Alan Clutterbuck, head of Fundacion RAP, a group based in Buenos Aires that seeks to improve the civility of political discourse.

"We should hold our political leaders to a different standard," he said. "You see a message that says 'I'm having a sandwich,' and you think: 'Who cares?'"

With a rich tradition of florid oratory, Latin America produced Cuba's Fidel Castro and his famed five-hour-long speeches. So it's unsurprising that some of its modern-day leaders have embraced a new platform to express themselves - but also struggle to shoehorn their thoughts into a few tidy blasts of 140 characters or less.

Politicians have also been hurling around insults since before the Twitter age, such as when the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez called former U.S. President George W. Bush the "devil" at the United Nations in 2006.

Yet there is no question that the technology has made the invective fly faster than ever before.

In the aftermath of this month's bitterly contested election to succeed Chavez in Venezuela, there were moments when both candidates were simultaneously tweeting attacks on each other.

Eventual winner Nicolas Maduro referred to the opposition as "fascists," declaring: "In their crazy hatred and desperation they're capable of anything." Losing candidate Henrique Capriles used Twitter to question the results of the voting hours after polls closed, tweeting "There is an illegitimate president!"

SHOWING THEIR HUMAN SIDE

Leaders elsewhere have also taken to Twitter, though not with the same fervor. U.S. President Barack Obama has a robust feed, but his profile says he only sends some himself, signing them "-bo." As of Friday, he hadn't done so in at least a month.

In contrast, Latin America's most prolific tweeting presidents - Fernandez, Maduro, Colombia's Juan Manuel Santos and Mexico's Enrique Pena Nieto - all send a large percentage of messages themselves, their aides say.

The most popular of all was Chavez, who had more than 4 million followers prior to his death in March.

Not everybody's on board: The president of the region's biggest country, Brazil's Dilma Rousseff, stopped tweeting right after she was elected in 2010. "She thinks it's a total waste of time," one aide said.

But for others, it has become part of their identity.

Since leaving office in 2010, former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has sometimes sent dozens of tweets a day criticizing Santos for being weak on security, among other alleged failings.

Uribe's critics say he has diminished his stature, and unfairly hamstrung his chosen successor, by weighing in so frequently on day-to-day affairs. But he has shown no signs of slowing down, and even hung in his home office a framed cartoon of himself hunched over his Blackberry, tweeting away.

"It allows direct communication, without intermediaries," Uribe said via e-mail. "The danger is that it tempts you to react to first impressions, so I try to avoid seeing many of the provocations that arrive."

At its best, Twitter can remind voters that their politicians are human - and even vulnerable.

The night of the march against her in Buenos Aires, Fernandez traveled to Caracas, and began to reflect on Chavez's death - words that added poignancy given the sudden passing of her own husband, former President Nestor Kirchner, in 2010.

"Why is it that those who live with so much intensity abandon us so soon?" she tweeted.

The following night, she started writing about "the human condition," before seemingly remembering that, even on Twitter, there are limits.

"Pardon me," she tweeted. "I started thinking, and since I can't speak (because my voice is gone), I'm channeling it through here."

"In the end, it's healthy and absolutely inoffensive."

(Additional reporting by Helen Murphy in Bogota; Editing by Kieran Murray and Sandra Maler)

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